That April Fool's Day joke I did about RSA being broken by the Russians has generated 25 responses on sci.crypt and sci.math (where I posted it after sending it out to this list). (Someone added soc.culture.soviet to the dist list.) Here's a recent one, which indicates I guessed fairly accurately that Kolmogorov was involved, or his methods were. The Wolfram hypothesis, noted to me by Eric Hughes and confirmed by Wolfram, is also supported. --Tim Newsgroups: sci.crypt,sci.math,soc.culture.soviet Subject: Re: RSA Broken by the Russians? Message-ID: <1994Apr7.163939.31350@husc14.harvard.edu> From: verbit@coolidge.harvard.edu (Misha Verbitsky) Date: 7 Apr 94 16:39:38 EDT Distribution: world Organization: Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv In article <GENE.94Apr6161116@insti.physics.sunysb.edu> gene@insti.physics.sunysb.edu (Eugene Tyurin) writes:

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"MV" == Misha Verbitsky <verbit@widder.harvard.edu> writes:

MV> This secret city probably exists, but the mathematical quality of MV> Soviet secret cryptography is extremely low. First of all, KGB MV> did not try to recruit graduates of Universities (at least as far MV> as I know).

Well, may be I'm awfully wrong, but in the Moscow University there was a special "Department of Structural Linguistics" (or something like this) which was rumoured to be a KGB crypto-college. I remember (from the time I was studying for the admission exams) that their math tests were as hard as the ones for Math, Physics departments. I can guess from this that the quality of students was the same.

Well, dept. of Structural Linguistic was a section of philology department. It was organized by the famous logicist V. A. Uspensky who was friendly with Tartu (and Moscow) school of structural linguistic. The intent was, Lotman and Co. used (or believed they use) Kolmogorov's notions of entropy and complexity in philology, so philologists who wanted to study structuralism needed to learn some mathematics. For a while, MSU Str. Ling. dept. was the best philology school in the country. Now, after a serie of pogroms it still remains one of the best school (mostly because after those pogroms all MSU philology department went awry). Since I was friendly with some of Uspensky's students I know the situation firsthand. The students of Str. Ling. dept. were 80% girls, they did't know (or like) math, and most of the math lecturers (after Uspensky) were Jews and/or dissidents. I doubt strongly KGB would use many people connected with Str. Ling. dept., though I know some whom they offered cooperation. Anyway, Str. Ling. dept. have had no classified courses, unlike most of other MSU depts. The funny sci.math related detail: Uspensky read calculus on Str. Ling. dept. for years. After a while he became bored and instead of usual calculus program offered the non-standard analysis course. Poor girls, who naturally hated mathematics, were completely distressed, because now they could not even make they boyfriends to do their problem sets. Misha. P. S. I apologise for Vulis reposting every second article that I post to sci.math. I hope you stay amused. There is no way to make Vulis stop this practice, as far as I understand. I think he developed a crash on my net.personality.